Any species that is willing to wait 250,000 years to avoid a 16 LY trip would never get to space at all.
You also have to consider the threshold for smaller groupings than entire species. For example, if my religious cult wants to go, it's a lot cheaper and safer to go with a smaller trip even if it takes a bit longer to get there. There might also be a lot more parties taking the thing seriously, if the nearest system is several times closer than the current 4.3 light years.
The differences in English between areas over the last century has become more pronounced not less.
No, I have to agree with the claim that English has gotten very homogenized. Lot of interesting dialects in US and England have near vanished. For example, cockney is not a dialect, but hundreds or thousands of dialects, most which aren't spoken any more. The US dialects just aren't as strong and weird as they used to be. And I bet your wife would have even more trouble with Australian dialects a century ago.
What to do when a national is developing nucelear weapons in disagreement with the ban is supposed to be handled by the united nations.
Unless, of course, it gets handled by someone else who cares more about the subject and has more power to project. Just because the UN exists doesn't mean that member states magically lose all self-interest or instinct for survival.
"I have indicated it was not in conformity with the UN Charter. From our point of view, from the charter point of view, it was illegal."
So what? "Our view" and the "charter point of view" aren't the official views of the UN.
First, Nazi is a noun not an acronym. Second, the Euro is controlled by the ECB where the Bundesbank has only one vote. It is led by an Italian. However, Merkel is a neoliberal politician fueled by a strategy based on demobilizing the opposition. Key is her phrase of "no alternatives". Her goal is similar to other neoliberals like Cameron to reduce state influnce as much as possible. If you feel conquered its by the world upper class.
I find people who hold such views are "demobilized" by their own stupidity rather than being held back by their betters. Make enough stupid decisions and you'll paint yourself into a corner. That's what demobilization really is.
Iraq did not attack the United States or present even a remote threat to the United States.
They tried to develop nuclear weapons and they invaded a US ally. That's two right there. Just because they weren't capable of doing those things in 2003, doesn't mean that they would have stayed in that state forever after.
I have to say as a Brit visiting Huntsville in Alabama, it was a shock to find that they named the local exhibition centre after the designer of the V rockets that hit London during WW2.
What gets me is why did they ever stop? I would have thought that urban renewal via explosive rocket would have been expensive enough that they'd have funded it forever.
There is substantial evidence supporting a minimum sustainable population. That is, once we reach a certain minimum size, we as a population regress and actually lose knowledge and technology.
Then let's see this evidence. What knowledge and technology has been lost as a result of regression effects from population growth?
I quote the previous poster's statements exactly so I could answer your question before you asked it. The previous poster wrote about much more than just Scandinavian societies with high, possibly relevant happiness indices.
So it is not credible to point out how capitalism allows events like the GFC or any of the other hundreds of examples where money has been leveraged to unfairly bend society for the purposes of those with money.
Quite true. Because socialism, the other end of this particular scale, also allowed those events.
nevermind that pure capitalism isn't a meritocracy at all, it's a static class of structure of a few ultrarich and a sea of miserable poor
Interesting how one has to strain credulity in order to say anything particularly bad about "pure capitalism", but "pure socialism" leaves its failures in plain view. My view on this is that a capitalist society is a very dynamic one. It may as you assert tend to social stratefication, but you are ignore tremendous wealth transfers from rich to poor (such as employment, charity, costly displays of social status, etc) that act to alleviate this disparity.
to worship the idea of capitalism as some sort of perfect utopia is naive, ignorant, and just dumb, really. it reveals a lack of education and a heavy indoctrination into a dimwitted propaganda without any critical thought
Yes, so "capitalism worshippers" are doubleplus ungood? I guess nobody ought to be one then!
Replace pension manager with CEO and you see the scope of the problem.
There is a big difference. The pension and fund managers are the kingmakers. They have control over a vast amount of voting shares in companies. Their disinterest and short term greed translates into similarly endowed CEOs.
Another factor which I didn't mention is bailouts. A lot of these players, both fund managers and CEOs can rely on some degree of public funding to ease their bad decisions.
The underlying fault to this whole mess IMHO is Other Peoples' Money (OPM). When decisions are made by people who control OPM, this leads to a fundamental conflict of interest and a disengagement between the decision and the consequences of that decision.
I don't know about the original poster, but here's my take:
What exactly is your definition of "public" philanthropy?
That it is publicly funded and purports to solve the sort of problems that are associated with philanthropy (improve the human condition, promote the arts, etc).
And how do you define its success or failure?
By looking at how well it satisfies its purported goals, given the money spent.
No, science can't prove metaphysical beings and basically all gods have some metaphysical properties.
No, being metaphysical doesn't mean that you can't have an observable aspect. For example, an omnipotent, omniscience being should be able to arbitrarily move the entire galaxy an arbitrary distance. But we wouldn't be able to distinguish them from a lesser being capable of the same feat.
The American economy in the last 40 years has become increasingly tied to the the stock market and the quarterly expectations of shareholders.
Bullshit. The stock market doesn't do anything more now than it did forty years ago. And why should shareholders have short term quarterly expectations instead of long term expectations? You completely miss the big picture.
Consider this scenario. I'm a pension manager for a large company or municipality and I have absolutely no long term stake in the welfare of the pension fund (an unfortunately common problem in the developed world over the past forty years) with a considerable sum in . I have no incentive to think long term while simultaneously I have voting control over a large amount of stock shares. I'm not a shareholder , but I have the power of a large shareholder.
Moving on, my wealth and hence, my decisions are decided by my end of year bonuses rather than by the long term consequences. Thus, I do things like go with the company that promises 15% ROI, but will fail in ten years over a company that provides 5% ROI indefinitely. I get many years of larger bonuses in the first case and it's not any skin off my teeth, when that company fails. I just need to make sure that no one can prove I knew it was going to fail.
Also in the mean time, I can use that high ROI to transfer money out of the pension fund to other uses. After all, with such high ROI, they don't really need so much money in that fund, right? And the money goes to other important purposes, like balancing a sickly town's budget. So that's another way I can loot my pension fund while appearing to diligently be protecting the assets of my customers.
In other words, we've created a society chock full of perverse and destructive incentives, which encourages short term, foolish decisions over wise, long term ones. So why do we have a zillion Slashdotters vigorously advocating for more of the same? I think it's a complete disconnect from reality.
No, though it is as close as it gets in the natural world. Notice that bacteria don't have a problem with overpopulation. They just die-off when there's not enough food available. There's always survivors to carry on and die-offs don't have much effect beyond the local environment. Humans can have die-offs that affect the entire globe and possibly drive humanity and many other species to extinction.
Simple: they're trying to maximize profits. At current productivity levels availability of labor is not the main limiting factor for production, thus unemployment exists; since unemployment exists, the law of supply and demand makes it possible to pay less and demand more from employees, thus the employers do just that.
Then what is the main limiting factor? Resources, land, and capital aren't all that expensive either. Instead, I think it's a standard regulatory problem: disincentivize employment and as a result less people are employed.
Give social security generous enough that not working becomes an okay life strategy. Force employers to actually compete for employees, even for McJobs, and wages will rise and business models only profitable by exploiting desperate people will collapse due to lack of such people. Simultaneously, use toll barriers to protect against offshoring and tax all income generated within the country, no matter where the corporate headquarters are nominally located.
You still have to come with a funding source for this social security. Employers already compete for employees, there's no need to "force" them to do that. And protectionism won't succeed when you cut your economy off from the success and innovation of the places that aren't failing hard.
On that last remark, isolationism can succeed, but you have to be willing to sacrifice, such as greatly reducing the protections and benefits workers get. For example, the two most successful cases I can think of where isolationism worked to build up local industry, Meiji Japan and Paraguay in the mid-19th century are the best examples I can think of, but both of them granted little in the way of rights for employees.
Moving on, we in the developed world have already implemented many of these proposals. You should show they work somewhere first.
For every increase in human population on the Earth the standard of living goes down for humanity as a whole
Not true. For example, if humanity was a single tribe and remained at the size of a few hundred people for the rest of eternity, it is extremely unlikely that they would develop any real understanding of the world. Nor would they be capable over the livable span of the Earth to use a significant fraction of the Earth's resources for anything..
Slashdot Mirror
NSA holds no power, other than to control what is shown above. They can not arrest anybody.
The NSA is a cog in a huge machine that includes numerous law enforcement agencies. The power of arrest is there.
Any species that is willing to wait 250,000 years to avoid a 16 LY trip would never get to space at all.
You also have to consider the threshold for smaller groupings than entire species. For example, if my religious cult wants to go, it's a lot cheaper and safer to go with a smaller trip even if it takes a bit longer to get there. There might also be a lot more parties taking the thing seriously, if the nearest system is several times closer than the current 4.3 light years.
Guilty until proven innocent is the standard for intelligence agencies. Deal with it.
The differences in English between areas over the last century has become more pronounced not less.
No, I have to agree with the claim that English has gotten very homogenized. Lot of interesting dialects in US and England have near vanished. For example, cockney is not a dialect, but hundreds or thousands of dialects, most which aren't spoken any more. The US dialects just aren't as strong and weird as they used to be. And I bet your wife would have even more trouble with Australian dialects a century ago.
The issue isn't population numbers. It's what the global 1% are doing. And they're learning English in increasing numbers.
And the global 1% may be doing something else in 2115. These things change. Mandarin is certainly a good bet for a replacement language in 2115.
Sure, but the ones who made stupid decisions aren't those holding GP's views
Anyone eating that dog food is going to have a tough time in life. Rule number one for drug dealers: don't use your own product.
What to do when a national is developing nucelear weapons in disagreement with the ban is supposed to be handled by the united nations.
Unless, of course, it gets handled by someone else who cares more about the subject and has more power to project. Just because the UN exists doesn't mean that member states magically lose all self-interest or instinct for survival.
"I have indicated it was not in conformity with the UN Charter. From our point of view, from the charter point of view, it was illegal."
So what? "Our view" and the "charter point of view" aren't the official views of the UN.
First, Nazi is a noun not an acronym. Second, the Euro is controlled by the ECB where the Bundesbank has only one vote. It is led by an Italian. However, Merkel is a neoliberal politician fueled by a strategy based on demobilizing the opposition. Key is her phrase of "no alternatives". Her goal is similar to other neoliberals like Cameron to reduce state influnce as much as possible. If you feel conquered its by the world upper class.
I find people who hold such views are "demobilized" by their own stupidity rather than being held back by their betters. Make enough stupid decisions and you'll paint yourself into a corner. That's what demobilization really is.
Iraq did not attack the United States or present even a remote threat to the United States.
They tried to develop nuclear weapons and they invaded a US ally. That's two right there. Just because they weren't capable of doing those things in 2003, doesn't mean that they would have stayed in that state forever after.
I have to say as a Brit visiting Huntsville in Alabama, it was a shock to find that they named the local exhibition centre after the designer of the V rockets that hit London during WW2.
What gets me is why did they ever stop? I would have thought that urban renewal via explosive rocket would have been expensive enough that they'd have funded it forever.
There is substantial evidence supporting a minimum sustainable population. That is, once we reach a certain minimum size, we as a population regress and actually lose knowledge and technology.
Then let's see this evidence. What knowledge and technology has been lost as a result of regression effects from population growth?
People say our economic system is capitalism, but it's not, it's managementism. The managers of others money have all the power.
Sounds on the mark to me.
How on earth did you reach that conclusion?
I quote the previous poster's statements exactly so I could answer your question before you asked it. The previous poster wrote about much more than just Scandinavian societies with high, possibly relevant happiness indices.
So it is not credible to point out how capitalism allows events like the GFC or any of the other hundreds of examples where money has been leveraged to unfairly bend society for the purposes of those with money.
Quite true. Because socialism, the other end of this particular scale, also allowed those events.
nevermind that pure capitalism isn't a meritocracy at all, it's a static class of structure of a few ultrarich and a sea of miserable poor
Interesting how one has to strain credulity in order to say anything particularly bad about "pure capitalism", but "pure socialism" leaves its failures in plain view. My view on this is that a capitalist society is a very dynamic one. It may as you assert tend to social stratefication, but you are ignore tremendous wealth transfers from rich to poor (such as employment, charity, costly displays of social status, etc) that act to alleviate this disparity.
to worship the idea of capitalism as some sort of perfect utopia is naive, ignorant, and just dumb, really. it reveals a lack of education and a heavy indoctrination into a dimwitted propaganda without any critical thought
Yes, so "capitalism worshippers" are doubleplus ungood? I guess nobody ought to be one then!
Don't know if you've looked out the window lately, but humanity is a lot bigger than a few hundred people...
I was merely disproving the original poster's assertion by providing a counterexample.
Replace pension manager with CEO and you see the scope of the problem.
There is a big difference. The pension and fund managers are the kingmakers. They have control over a vast amount of voting shares in companies. Their disinterest and short term greed translates into similarly endowed CEOs.
Another factor which I didn't mention is bailouts. A lot of these players, both fund managers and CEOs can rely on some degree of public funding to ease their bad decisions.
The underlying fault to this whole mess IMHO is Other Peoples' Money (OPM). When decisions are made by people who control OPM, this leads to a fundamental conflict of interest and a disengagement between the decision and the consequences of that decision.
What exactly is your definition of "public" philanthropy?
That it is publicly funded and purports to solve the sort of problems that are associated with philanthropy (improve the human condition, promote the arts, etc).
And how do you define its success or failure?
By looking at how well it satisfies its purported goals, given the money spent.
No, science can't prove metaphysical beings and basically all gods have some metaphysical properties.
No, being metaphysical doesn't mean that you can't have an observable aspect. For example, an omnipotent, omniscience being should be able to arbitrarily move the entire galaxy an arbitrary distance. But we wouldn't be able to distinguish them from a lesser being capable of the same feat.
The American economy in the last 40 years has become increasingly tied to the the stock market and the quarterly expectations of shareholders.
Bullshit. The stock market doesn't do anything more now than it did forty years ago. And why should shareholders have short term quarterly expectations instead of long term expectations? You completely miss the big picture.
Consider this scenario. I'm a pension manager for a large company or municipality and I have absolutely no long term stake in the welfare of the pension fund (an unfortunately common problem in the developed world over the past forty years) with a considerable sum in . I have no incentive to think long term while simultaneously I have voting control over a large amount of stock shares. I'm not a shareholder , but I have the power of a large shareholder.
Moving on, my wealth and hence, my decisions are decided by my end of year bonuses rather than by the long term consequences. Thus, I do things like go with the company that promises 15% ROI, but will fail in ten years over a company that provides 5% ROI indefinitely. I get many years of larger bonuses in the first case and it's not any skin off my teeth, when that company fails. I just need to make sure that no one can prove I knew it was going to fail.
Also in the mean time, I can use that high ROI to transfer money out of the pension fund to other uses. After all, with such high ROI, they don't really need so much money in that fund, right? And the money goes to other important purposes, like balancing a sickly town's budget. So that's another way I can loot my pension fund while appearing to diligently be protecting the assets of my customers.
In other words, we've created a society chock full of perverse and destructive incentives, which encourages short term, foolish decisions over wise, long term ones. So why do we have a zillion Slashdotters vigorously advocating for more of the same? I think it's a complete disconnect from reality.
Does horizontal gene transfer count?
No, though it is as close as it gets in the natural world. Notice that bacteria don't have a problem with overpopulation. They just die-off when there's not enough food available. There's always survivors to carry on and die-offs don't have much effect beyond the local environment. Humans can have die-offs that affect the entire globe and possibly drive humanity and many other species to extinction.
If we don't have jobs then we don't have money. No money means we don't buy anything.
I have a ready solution. Make a society where employing people is appreciated not despised.
No buying means the corporations go broke.
Not at all. It just means the businesses go where the money is.
Bankrupt corporations means the Government nationalizes everything.
Digging that hole deeper.
Government can't run everything without money, so they conscript workers. (Communist Russia, here we come)
I have an alternate proposal for this epic fail. How about instead of being a bunch of shitheads, we don't do that?
Do you think that the extreme edge of that particular curve is either unknown or relevant to any of the grownups in the thread?
Yes, I do think that extreme edge is unknown to some of the posters in this thread.
Simple: they're trying to maximize profits. At current productivity levels availability of labor is not the main limiting factor for production, thus unemployment exists; since unemployment exists, the law of supply and demand makes it possible to pay less and demand more from employees, thus the employers do just that.
Then what is the main limiting factor? Resources, land, and capital aren't all that expensive either. Instead, I think it's a standard regulatory problem: disincentivize employment and as a result less people are employed.
Give social security generous enough that not working becomes an okay life strategy. Force employers to actually compete for employees, even for McJobs, and wages will rise and business models only profitable by exploiting desperate people will collapse due to lack of such people. Simultaneously, use toll barriers to protect against offshoring and tax all income generated within the country, no matter where the corporate headquarters are nominally located.
You still have to come with a funding source for this social security. Employers already compete for employees, there's no need to "force" them to do that. And protectionism won't succeed when you cut your economy off from the success and innovation of the places that aren't failing hard.
On that last remark, isolationism can succeed, but you have to be willing to sacrifice, such as greatly reducing the protections and benefits workers get. For example, the two most successful cases I can think of where isolationism worked to build up local industry, Meiji Japan and Paraguay in the mid-19th century are the best examples I can think of, but both of them granted little in the way of rights for employees.
Moving on, we in the developed world have already implemented many of these proposals. You should show they work somewhere first.
For every increase in human population on the Earth the standard of living goes down for humanity as a whole
Not true. For example, if humanity was a single tribe and remained at the size of a few hundred people for the rest of eternity, it is extremely unlikely that they would develop any real understanding of the world. Nor would they be capable over the livable span of the Earth to use a significant fraction of the Earth's resources for anything..